It’s everywhere in my home: piles of crap. In my room, it’s piles of clothes. On our dining room table, piles of papers – bills, fliers, my son’s artwork from school – you name it. In our kitchen, it’s cookbooks, jars of change, dishes filled with my daughter’s hair clips, and books, books, books everywhere.
I’m a clutter beast and there’s no changing it. The initial diagnosis was made in Grade 1 by my homeroom teacher, Miss Mosher, a stern salt ‘n pepper haired school marm with little patience for untidiness of any sort. At my first parent-teacher interview at the St. Stephen Elementary School, my parents were informed that, though I was a decent student and got along well with my peers, it had become increasingly clear that there were some significant issues in my school life: I was messy. My coat never stayed on its hanger, and my drawer was never tidy. For this, I was chastised…repeatedly.
This continued at each phase: in high school – my locker, in my dormitory – my room and in grad school – my apartment. Always charming and cozy, my many homes have been cursed by the demons of disorder. After attempting to change and reincarnate myself as a neat freak, I’ve accepted this flaw (some are harder to accept than others…) and come to terms with my clutterish tendencies.
Out of curiosity, I Googled "clutter" to see what came up: To my surprise, this is now a huge industry with numerous businesses devoted to rehabilitating the likes of me. I found Clutter Rescue, Clutter Magazine, Conquering Clutter and my favourite, Mind over Clutter, whose founder, Sharon Crosby believes that addressing her clutter is what finally allowed her to deal with some of her other issues in life. She writes on her site www.mindoverclutter.com,
"I learned to let go of a lot of the guilt and other emotions. I learned when to recognize when I was holding onto something I didn’t need because I had a belief that caused me to act certain ways."
Interesting. Would unloading some of my size 4 clothes from university liberate me from my many qualms related to body image? Somehow, I doubt it.
Instead, I choose to embrace the philosophies of Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, who recently wrote the book, “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder”. They claim that that tidiness is time-consuming, neatness negates creativity, and managing the mess wastes money.
Abrahamson and Freedman further write that too much emphasis is placed on good organisation. Most of us get along just fine with our piles of stuff, yesterday’s coffee mug here or there and last year’s receipts scattered all over our desk. We operate within systems of organised chaos that might not be pretty to look at, but they work for us – and that’s the main thing.
To support their theory Abrahamson and Freedman highlight achievements spawned from the fertile grounds of clutter. Did you know that the discovery of penicillin came because of an accident in Alexander Fleming’s bacteriological lab? A little more organisation in this scenario, and we might not have antibiotics.
clutter in our house as well. i don’t understand how some people can have homes and kids and no clutter anywhere. where do they keep all their stuff?
Hi there, I am a clutter freak as well. I can find just about anything in that stack of papers piled under the end table next to the other table that holds the laptop.
But if anyone in my household gets tired of looking at my “mess and disorganization” and attempts to declutter, they had better be prepared for my wrath.
Ask me where a bill or a receipt is in my piles of paper and I can tell you just about how far down to find what they are searching for. Organize my house and I am lost for days and sometimes even as long as a week.
I need my stacks, and piles and my all time favorite, “the junk drawer” And as much as some people want to deny it, I think every household has a junk drawer. The catch all, the sort it later, the receipt holder, the bills to be paid, the “junk drawer”.
I know all about the guilt factor, I have 2 or 3 plastic bins of items downstairs in my storage locker that my mother brought me from my grandmothers house. My grandmother went into a nursing home, and my Mom thought she would be nice and bring us some “things” to remember our grandmother by. Now I have these bins of guilt sitting down there, and I haven’t the room for them, nor do I have the heart to dispose of them.
I watch shows like Clean Sweep and Neat, and tell myself I would love to be so neat and organized, but I also have to come to the sad reality that just isn’t me.
My mother is a pack rat, I am a pack rat. But I am getting better, I am thinning things out as the years go by.
But some things are just hard to change.